Insight From a Reader

A reader of The Declination by the alias of fslenentine had this to say on the matter of Padraig and others like him.

The question of Padraig’s intellectual insecurity is more consequential than is generally realized.

Today, intelligence is increasingly the most important attribute one can possess. No longer are there multiple avenues to social worth, just the one.

The problem is that most people aren’t smart enough to be special, and two thirds of the population is average to below average.

This has produced a culture of lying. Everyone has to pretend to be smart, and we all have to pretend that they are so in order to avoid being called out for our own banal mediocrity. After all, the average IQ in this country is 98 but the average self-reported IQ is 118, more than a full standard deviation away.

The internet makes it incredibly easy to give the superficial appearance of intelligence. Consider the old tactic of “link-storming” in which someone would just post, in place of an actual argument, links upon links which often only have passing relevance.

The end result of this is that most everyone is pretending to be smarter than they are, and thus live lives of deceit. They are wracked with insecurity and it manifests in malice.

Psychologically speaking, they’re angry and resentful at the world because they aren’t as special as they’ve been told and/or imagine themselves to be.

I call it the “American Idol” problem in which a competent but unspectacular singer is turned down and leaves in utter shock, having never considered that he/she might not be good enough. After all, everyone told them how great they were.

People who live fraudulent lives are prone to resentfulness and then true malice.

I suspect that this has much to do with the embrace of postmodern marxism.

Universities, in a classic sense, challenge students with truly difficult material from truly remarkable minds. The brutal truth is that most people aren’t intellectually equipped to deal with Kant, Aquinas, Jung, and so on.

Bringing in more students means lowering the bar, intellectually speaking (and please, this is no comment on gender or race because that’s the first place Padraig will go. It’s a pure numbers game), not just for students but teachers.

Now we have generations of failed intellectuals with delusions of grandeur and wracked with resentment, unable to solve the immensely complex problems that society presents. As such, they retreat into pseudo-intellectualism, i.e. postmodernism.

It demands no rigor and affords them the ability to create what is the equivalent of fan theories about movies. Clever, fun, but meaningless. More so, they bury it in opacity. They abhor clarity for it exposes the vacuity of their efforts.

Increasingly mediocre teachers combined with even more increasingly mediocre students means a ripe environment for pseudo-intellectualism.

This affliction affects the slightly above average person the most because they’re smart enough to know that they’re above average, but not smart enough to be insightful or special. Thus, what’s their intelligence worth? To them it should entitle them to a place of status. Instead it just means that they can be a mid-level accountant or marketing manager. That’s simply not enough. They expected more. They were promised more. Now they feel angry and betrayed which causes them to lash out.

My rambling point is this: we overvalue pure intelligence and thus we create a situation in which many, many people have to pretend to be smarter than they are, and that produces psychological resentment, which is the foundation of malice.

Enter Padraig. He’s not here to discuss, which is what intelligent people generally do. They recognize the limits of their intellect and enjoy discussing with people who see the world differently. He’s not here for that. He’s not even here to lecture. He’s not even here to show-off his superior mind. He’s here to establish his bona fides as a true intellectual by attacking. That’s all he has: malice.

The all-too obvious problem is that he’s not particularly impressive. I don’t think he’s stupid but he seems perfectly average to slightly-above average. He offers no original thoughts of substance and I think it’s because he doesn’t have any, and he knows it, which is why he’s here, attacking a small blog.

Dystopic is, in his mind, an easy target. He wouldn’t risk going after someone who’s a heavyweight. Hell, I doubt he’d even risk attacking a minor leaguer like Ben Shapiro. He has no intellectual heft and he knows it. He just thinks Dystopic and his viewers don’t either.

***

This is a very important concept to understand. I’ve said for a long time that many Lefties are motivated by a desire to appear intelligent and moral, to be superior to those knuckle-dragging, hateful Republicans, or whatever the Leftist boogeyman of the day might be.

The question is why?

Fslenentine answered it succinctly. I frequently tell people here that I’m just a regular guy trying to work through the political ratfuck of our age. But the fact is, I could have been a Padraig myself, were circumstances a little different. I recognize in him certain character flaws that I once expressed, though not quite so obviously. Two things conspired to prevent that. First off, while I was probably the smartest kid in my high school (and it was not small), when I began writing software, I realized that much smarter men existed. I soon had the notion that I was uniquely clever or special beaten out of my skull.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, I began gaining recognition for genuine intellectual accomplishments. Nothing too big, nothing that would make me famous or land me a chapter in the history books, but real nonetheless. I started seeing my work out in the world – you’ve probably seen it too, though you’d never know it. And once you accomplish something real and meaningful like that, the sort of false ego-stroking you get from winning Internet debates on meaningless shit feels hollow and fake.

Nonetheless, it’s easy to become a cruel, angry person when reality doesn’t kiss your ass the same way all the fawning idiots of your youth did. I don’t blame a man for going through that period. But I do blame him for never exiting it.

“[I]t’s easy to become a cruel, angry person when reality doesn’t kiss your ass the same way all the fawning idiots of your youth did.”
——————————–

Yours and fslenentine’s self-serving, solipsistic analyses, so well illustrated by that quote, simply point out your utter lack of objectivity and reason when they contradict belief. (You might consider the possibility that everyone isn’t like you, Dystopic.)

Perhaps you could cite a few of those instances wherein my behavior manifested my “cruelty and anger”. Not actually being the least bit angry, “I” can’t think of a one. Rather, exposing your myriad prejudiced beliefs has been FUN.

“NA, NA, NA-NA, NAAA! I’M not the one who’s Steeoopid – YOU ARR! Yah! I Gotchya! Sick Burn!”
and
“I’M not the one who started saying Nasty things – YOU DID! Uh Huh! And that’s cuz I’m BETTER than you! Yah! Neener neener!”

We’re running low on the buttered popcorn, I’ll go back and get some more. Anybody want something to drink? Or some licorice sticks? Those are always great with popcorn. 🙂

Solipsis is the belief that only the self exists, or at least can be known to exist for sure.

As you’ve applied the term, it doesn’t make any sense. After all, you applied it to our analyses collectively, as we hold roughly the same view.

That statement is nonsense. Literal gibberish.

Your context clues indicate that you think it means self-involvement or a kind of selfish myopia or bias.

You claim to engage in dialectic and acting as an intellectual debunker or skeptic. If you understood the concepts, you’d realize that those two are incompatible.

Debunking is about finding errors. It doesn’t make a case of its own. Dialectic, in this context, is about finding truth through the engagement of two different positions on a claim. That demands that you actually identify the issue and offer up an oppositional claim. That’s how dialectic works…. claim, counter, and movement or synthesis. So where is your claim?

Truly, where is it?

Oh, right, you’ve not made one.

What you have done is make accusations as though the declaration itself is the proof, and then you claim to revel in your victory. That’s certainly not dialectic but it’s not skepticism either.

The sad part is that if you in fact are reveling in your intellectual glory then I was wrong and you are in fact legitimately stupid. Perhaps you are but I hope it’s just posturing.

You use terms incorrectly but always with bravado. That indicates a kind of recklessness that admittedly surprised me.

What did you think would happen when you ran into someone who is familiar with the language you like to throw around? Did you imagine that such a thing would never happen? Did you really think that you were using the language correctly?

I’m going to paraphrase Aristotle on his criticism of sophists. Your premises are false and your conclusions don’t follow.

In other words, you got everything wrong that was possible to get wrong.

I’ll leave you with this: if what you’re doing is worth your time then your time is worthless. As such, I encourage you to spend your time actual learning. Take the great issues of humanity, as contemplated by the great minds of humanity, and contemplate them, engage and be humbled by them.

I won’t be around so there’s no need to try and “show me up,” but you really ought to do better, for yourself.

This is fast company here and I agree with what I understand. The subject and the way he uses words also reminds me ever so much as Melville’s great whale. When he comments it’s like the whale broaching with Roget not Ahab firmly lashed to him.
Nice to run into you fslenentine 1. I will be much more careful when I use one of my 3 or 4 big words, Heh!

Fslenentine1 has done a much better job of explaining your errors than I could. But there is a thing I wish to add.

You refer to me (and fslenentine1) as solipsistic, and as fslenentine1 explains, this is completely wrong, at least in this instance. I suggest that my own life experiences may mirror yours at some level. That is the opposite of solipsism. In fact, it is a demonstration of empathy, the ability to put yourself in another man’s shoes and attempt to understand him better. That I used my own life experience to do this is normal and to be expected. I should note that I don’t think fslenentine1’s experience mirrors mine. Just yours.

To understand what solipsism is, I will offer an example I was just reading a couple of days ago.

A woman was attempting to give directions to a man she was dating. The woman’s instructions included “turn right at my stoplight.” But she didn’t specify which street her stoplight was at. When the man called her, she kept saying “turn right at my stoplight, it’s right next to my apartment building!” Her frame of reference was such that she wasn’t taking into account the possibility that the man would not know which light was hers, or which apartment building was hers. After all *she* knew which one it was!

Now, let’s compare to empathy. A former drug addict recognizes behavior in another man that is similar to behavior he engaged in when he was an addict. Thus he highly suspects the man is an addict. He says to the man “hey, I’ve been there, I went through what you’re going through. You can escape. You can get out.” That’s empathy.

See the difference?

Fslenentine1 is a wiser man than I am, and is able to articulate these distinctions better than I can. Whether that is a matter of knowledge or intelligence, or perhaps just more life experience, I cannot say. But I can flat out tell you that he is better than I am at this. The fact that you cannot admit the same is revealing about your character.

You ignorant misdefinition of “solipsism*” is illustrative of your inept analysis in toto. One must know what one is talking about before one can assert a valuable opinion. Your most recent screed is but another compendium of falsehoods, misstatements and puerile imputations delivered verbosely as the substance of extraordinary, utterly unsupported opinion.

As with your colleagues, Dystopic and Triple Sphinctered Wombat, one suspects that your description of another is actually an ingenuous description of yourself.

* solipsism

1. The view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

There it is… the definition of it as “selfish” is a second-rate definition that’s incongruous with its dominant usage, sort of like the way some dictionaries have added a secondary definition of literal that means the opposite of its primary definition just because so many people use it wrong.

That’s what you, Padraig, have done, and then you’ve sourced it as though it’s an authoritative defense against my accusations.

But you had to look it up, just to be sure, didn’t you? You thought it was “credible” but it isn’t to any educated person.

It’s not about the word. It’s about your process. No one would have used that word, in the context you used it, as a first choice. No… you probably got there by way of an online thesaurus. The definition works, but it’s not natural. There are likely a dozen better words that an educated person would have used, more vicious words, clearer words.

You’re putting minimal but ferocious effort into appearing credible and I’m trying to teach you that it’s not working. Better to put in real effort into being a person of substance and dignity, not this delusion king in your own mind.

Because honestly, educated people write with a style that reflects their education, and choose words to use in contexts that indicate how they learned them. Their language expresses their education. You write precisely like you have a thesaurus open in front of you. There are no clues to your education but there are clues… you don’t use philosophical words or concepts, scientific, archaic, or so on. You just use a random selection and the only people who do that are smartphone intellectuals.

Be something better than that.

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Padraig
on September 29, 2017 at 10:47 pm

to fslenentine1:

Quote:

“There it is… the definition of it as “selfish” is a second-rate definition that’s incongruous with its dominant usage, sort of like the way some dictionaries have added a secondary definition of literal that means the opposite of its primary definition just because so many people use it wrong.”
————————————————

“American Idol problem”: and here, modern communications tech and globalization are such a female canine. In the old days, the “competent but not great” American Idol singer would have been been the best singer in his small-town, competing with maybe one or two like him. Because prior to recording technology, live music was the only game in town. Only the truly big leaguers had to worry about competition from even 500 miles away — the kind that commanded high enough fees that it was worthwhile to travel that far by stage coach or steamer.

Likewise with some other fields — writing, programming,…. Before the Internet, somebody who was the smartest coder in Eau Claire, WI (say) would basically be competing with the few others like him. Now, you’re up against every coder with internet access on the planet… Current events commentators for small-town printed newspapers 100 years ago wasn’t having to duke it out on the net with people much more erudite and well-informed than themselves…

Now if your interest is learning and finding things out, then the opportunity to interact with people much smarter and better informed than yourself is a blessing. If one (like this commenter of yours) mainly cares about being a big fish, however, the change from small pond to globalized sweet water sea is a curse, not a blessing…

While I rarely comment, I am a reader of Dystopic and have been following the recent discussions in comments.
You have not exposed any prejudiced beliefs and certainly have not exposed myriad prejudiced beliefs.
Ever stop and think that just maybe it’s your own beliefs that are ” prejudiced”?
The thing you miss is that you refuse to learn from those smarter than you because you refuse to believe that they are in fact smarter than you.
You often use words incorrectly as was pointed out to you.
Did you learn from that? No, you keep acting like you were right all along when you clearly were not.
Get over yourself and learn from others, rather than attacking anyone who doesn’t believe in the same things you do.
Maybe then you’ll learn that you are not right about everything, that different people have different beliefs, but some things have been proven to be really bad ideas time and again throughout history.

That’s a good question, and probably worthy of a post all on its own. I can tell you how I escaped…

I hung around people smarter and wiser than I am. I read their work, I asked them questions, I challenged them but then took their replies seriously and tried to remove emotion from it. I started from the basis that I could be wrong, and I wanted to learn. Some people who have been of great help: Francis (the owner of the blog Liberty’s Torch), Tom Kratman, and Sarah Hoyt.

Like a drug addict, the first step is admitting you have a problem. The second is to find and interact with intelligent people, and learn from them. Eventually, this becomes a pleasant experience. You know you’ve been cured when you read a reply that proves you were in error about something, and the reaction is positive, not negative. You are glad to learn something new, not angry that you made a mistake.

Edit: One other thing… when looking for people to learn from, look for folks who meet two criteria. 1. The person should be pleasant to interact with, provided you are the same. No snark, no airs of superiority. Those things will make interaction negative and then you won’t want to converse with him, no matter how intelligent your teacher is. 2. The person should also be blunt. Subtlety can come later. You need obvious answers, clear and concise.

Good job Dys and it ain’t easy.
A quick note (before I go to the stool of silence). From the style and emphasis of his commenting (mostly style) I believe your esteemed guest might be more than one person.

Dystopic is right, spend time around people who are smarter than you but there’s more…

Spend time dealing with ambitious problems.

Great minds tackle great problems. Problems that most of us can’t even get our heads around, certainly not at first.

It humbles you to attempt to address an issue that you think is simple, because some thinker came up with an answer that makes sense to you. Your possession of that person’s wisdom gives you an overblown sense of the problem… so go read counter-positions. They will chip away at your belief that the questions were simple.

Then try and tackle problems for which there are no answers, or at least no readily apparent ones.

Like physics? Learn about Bohmian mechanics instead of just standard quantum theory. It’ll throw you for a loop.

Like philosophy? Learn about Hume’s is-ought problem, feel superior, and the read about Jung’s archetypes.

Do difficult things. They humble you and only the humble person can emerge exit from that dark place of arrogance.

The left in general rates ‘intelligence’ over all other qualities in a person (as to why would be an essay in itself). The Democrat party ‘officially’ endorsed that view in the election of Bill Clinton. The Democrat party leadership knew what kind of sleazeball Clinton was but was so desperate to win the presidency that they went all in on him since they thought he was their best chance for victory. That’s when you started seeing all the stories of how smart Clinton was that ignored other personal qualities such as character, honesty and restraint that used to be metrics for public office.

What’s really sad is that the left doesn’t even really venerate intelligence…. they venerate credentials. If you graduate from the ‘right’ school your intelligent, if you don’t you’re stupid.

Here is a question. Ivy leaguers have been running this country for decades. If they are so smart, why is the country so screwed up in so many ways?

I suspect that this anger is what is behind many women’s fury. They’ve largely given up a field of work in which they truly were special and destined to be remembered for years after their death.
And, they did it, not for glory and the mention in the history books, but for middle-management positions, at best.
Like you, I’m smart enough, but truly humbled when I put myself against peers in the workplace:
– gifted teachers (I’ve had occasional flashes of brilliance, but, only flashes),
– gifted physicists – as they say in Bob & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, “I’m not worthy”,
– gifted writers – I don’t kid myself that I’m in that category. I can write relatively entertaining blogposts, sometimes, and am completing a novel that might give a few evening’s pleasure.